ASEAN-Australia summit
ASEAN-Australia summit
What to watch at the ASEAN-Australia summit, What to Expect From the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit
UPDATES: Next week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will host the leaders of ASEAN and Timor-Leste for a summit to commemorate 50 years of partnership. Thanks to the cancellation of the 2023 Quad summit, this will be the biggest international meeting Australia has hosted since … the first ASEAN-Australia special summit in 2018.
The March 4-6 summit seeks to build on the progress that has taken place in ASEAN-Australia relations under Prime Minister Albanese’s Labor government.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the 2022 ASEAN summit (@AlboMP/X)
What to watch at the
ASEAN-Australia summit
By Susannah Patton
Next week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will host the leaders of ASEAN and Timor-Leste for a summit to commemorate 50 years of partnership. Thanks to the cancellation of the 2023 Quad summit, this will be the biggest international meeting Australia has hosted since … the first ASEAN-Australia special summit in 2018.
What’s on the agenda this time round?
A mostly new crew
Most of the ASEAN leaders will be visiting Australia for the first time, at least in their terms in office. This means a big focus will be on relationship building. The exceptions are outgoing Indonesian President Joko Widodo, elder statesman Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore, and the long-ruling Sultan of Brunei. Ferdinand “Bong Bong” Marcos of the Philippines, Pham Minh Chinh of Vietnam, and Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim are undertaking separate bilateral programs to mark their first visits to Australia since taking office. Cambodia, Laos and Thailand also have new faces at the top, although to varying degrees each represents regime continuity.
Timor-Leste is now an official ASEAN observer, so Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão will join the Melbourne meetings. Australia has long wanted to see Dili welcomed into regional forums such as this, so will embrace Timor-Leste’s participation enthusiastically.
Finally, an extra guest: Albanese has invited New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to cross the Tasman and meet his ASEAN counterparts.
A cut-through narrative
ASEAN matters, but often sags under the weight of acronyms and bureaucratic initiatives. Summit outcomes can proliferate – last year’s ASEAN-Japan summit announced a 130-point action plan. A US-ASEAN summit in 2022 suffered for a disjointed focus on disparate initiatives. Australia has set itself up for success by identifying a few key areas of focus: climate and energy; maritime cooperation; and economic ties. To differentiate itself from other dialogue partners, who are also competing for ASEAN’s attention, Australia will need clear and impactful outcomes that reinforce these priorities.
Search for economic outcomes
The Albanese government has hung its hat on boosting economic relations between Australia and Southeast Asia, with Nicholas Moore’s 2023 report Invested providing a blueprint. The summit will include a CEO Forum and briefings to help Australian small and medium-sized enterprises do business in Southeast Asia. Sound familiar? The 2018 ASEAN-Australia summit was also preceded by a major report exhorting Australian business to seize the ASEAN opportunity and included a CEO Forum and SME Conference. New funding and government support is now in play to actively facilitate Australian investment in the region, but will it really shift the needle?
Hot button issues and controversies
Despite its absence from the summit table, Myanmar will loom large in Melbourne. It remains the group’s single biggest challenge, but, in the face of intractable conflict, ASEAN’s diplomacy has stalled. Australia has heavily backed ASEAN to address the crisis and will likely want to discuss Myanmar privately in the summit’s retreat session and bilateral meetings.
More broadly, the poor human rights record of some ASEAN members means that some degree of criticism and protest on this score is always likely, including from diaspora communities in Australia. A couple of factors suggest that these issues may be less tense this time round, however: Cambodia’s strongman ruler Hun Sen, who goaded protesters in 2018, has been replaced by his son Hun Manet, who seeks to present a less confrontational global image. Likewise, the Philippines’ Marcos has struck a different tone from his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte, even if he has not officially ended the “war against drugs” campaign.
Another source of potential controversy: diverging views on the Hamas-Israel conflict. Malaysia maintains ties with Hamas, which it does not designate a terrorist organisation. Anwar has rejected Western pressure to condemn Hamas following the 7 October attacks on Israel. Restating these positions in Australia would embarrass the Albanese government.
The Albanese government’s policy of seeking stabilisation in its relations with Beijing, which plays well with ASEAN countries, makes public controversy related to China policy, including the South China Sea, less likely.
Read more.
The ASEAN way (@SenatorWong/X)
What to Expect From the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit
By Sebastian Strangio
Next week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will host leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Melbourne for the second ASEAN-Australia Special Summit. The March 4-6 summit marks 50 years since Australia became the bloc’s first official Dialogue Partner, and will also be attended by Xanana Gusmão, the leader of aspiring ASEAN member Timor-Leste, and New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.
The summit seeks to consolidate and build on the progress in ASEAN-Australia relations that has taken place under Albanese’s Labor government, which came to office in 2022 pledging to bolster the country’s relations with the region and ensure that its importance to Australia’s security and economic future was matched by a commensurate diplomatic commitment.
The government has since appointed a special envoy for the region and created an Office of Southeast Asia within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, modeled on the department’s existing Office of the Pacific. As promised, it unveiled a comprehensive economic strategy for the region – “Invested: Australia’s Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040” – in a bid to deepen business and trade ties. Albanese also pointedly chose Indonesia as the destination of his first bilateral state visit.
Southeast Asia “is where Australia’s economic destiny lies, and this is where our shared prosperity can be built,” Albanese said in announcing the special summit at the ASEAN-Indo-Pacific Forum in Jakarta last year. “This is where, working together, the peace, stability and security of this region – and the Indo-Pacific – can be assured.”
What can we expect from the summit? As Susannah Patton of the Lowy Institute noted in her preview of the summit, the first notable aspect is the number of new faces who will be attending, compared to the last special summit in 2018. In addition to Albanese, the leaders of Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam have all taken office over the past two years and are undertaking their first official visits to Australia. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines, Vietnam’s Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, and Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim are also taking the opportunity to hold separate bilateral meetings with their Australian counterparts while in the country.
Given that relations between Australia and its Southeast Asian neighbors have often promised more than they have delivered, the fact that such a summit is being convened is in some sense as important as the specifics of what will be discussed. That said, Australia has ensured that the official agenda is focused on a handful of key issues – climate and clean energy, maritime cooperation, and economic ties – that focus on areas of mutual interest.
Of these, economics is the perennial agenda item for the Albanese team, as suggested by the launch last year of the 2040 strategy document. The plan committed nearly A$100 million over four years to fund investment deal teams, internships for young professionals and support for Australian companies looking to enter the region.
Climate and clean energy are obviously key areas of cooperation. As Nicholas Basan argued in these pages last year, Australia’s technical know-how in areas like green energy and critical minerals make it an ideal partner for the massive private investments that are required to realize Southeast Asia’s enormous renewable energy potential. What impact the Albanese government’s efforts have over the short to medium term – as with relations in general, hope and rhetoric about the ASEAN-Australia economic relationship have tended to outpace the reality – remains to be seen.
Other issues will no doubt force themselves onto next week’s agenda. The most obvious is the conflict in Myanmar. As ASEAN’s most pressing regional challenge, this is likely to surface during the three-day summit, at least during the closed-door bilateral sessions. As with previous high-level ASEAN meetings, the military junta has not been invited to Melbourne. Like the United States and other Western countries, Australia has generally been content to support ASEAN’s own efforts to resolve the country’s crisis, even though these slowed to a crawl under the leadership of current ASEAN chair Laos. This makes it unlikely that the summit will produce anything beyond calls for adherence to ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus peace plan.
The issue of maritime cooperation will bring the summit into contact with one of the region’s most sensitive issues: the South China Sea. This has seen growing tensions over the past year, as the China Coast Guard has flexed its muscles in waters claimed by the Philippines, leading to a number of incidents in which Chinese and Philippine vessels have collided in contested waters. Marcos referenced these tensions at length during his address to the Australian Parliament yesterday, repeating his promise that he would “not allow any attempt by any foreign power to take even one square inch of our sovereign territory.” This suggests that the recent Chinese actions will be addressed during the summit, if only obliquely, given ASEAN member states’ varying degrees of relations with China and divergent stakes in the disputes.
This in turn points to perhaps the greatest area of potential divergence between Australia and ASEAN: how the two regions position themselves with regard to the tensions and intensifying strategic competition between the United States and China. Under Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Canberra committed itself to its U.S. alliance, mirroring the “China threat” rhetoric that has become commonplace in U.S. political discourse and enthusiastically joined the AUKUS pact in 2021.
While the initial Southeast Asian concerns about AUKUS appear to have waned with time, ideologically-tinged anti-China rhetoric has generally not gone down well in the region, where governments balk at any suggestion that they face a binary moral choice between a closed, China-led future and a “free and open” one under U.S. leadership. To take a recent example, in an interview with Financial Times last month, Anwar Ibrahim condemned the rising tide of “China-phobia” in the West.
“Why must I be tied to one interest? I don’t buy into this strong prejudice against China, this China-phobia,” the Malaysian leader said. He added that Malaysia seeks to maintain “good stable relations with the U.S. [while] looking at China as an important ally” – a similar desire to most, if not all, Southeast Asian states.
On this front, things are likely to be less rocky than they have been in the recent past. Foreign Minister Penny Wong, the descendant of Chinese-Malaysian immigrants, has criticized the Morrison government and its senior ministers for “relying on unhelpful binaries that reinforce existing prejudices of Australia in the region or reduce our complex environment to Cold War analogies.” Albanese has also succeeded somewhat in stabilizing Australia’s relationship with China, and arresting the downward spiral that took place under Morrison’s leadership – a deescalatory dynamic will no doubt have been welcomed in Southeast Asian capitals.
All told, the special summit represents a significant commitment of time, energy, and diplomatic resources to a region that is rightly described as central to Australia’s future security and prosperity. Looking beyond the close of the pageantry on March 6, the question that looms is the perennial one: how to bridge the gap between vision and reality.
On Australia’s part, this is something that probably requires a deeper reset of cultural and political expectations that are unlikely to happen over the span of a single administration. Even as past Australian leaders have extolled the importance of Southeast Asia, Alexander Lee wrote recently, they have tended to view Australia as standing apart from the region in which it is ensconced, “as an outpost of Western liberal democracy above all else.”
This is a worldview “that sees Australia continually looking beyond the region for security” – a perception that has endured, “even as economic links between Australia and ASEAN have grown to far exceed trade between Australia and its traditional security partners in Europe or North America.”
As a symbol of commitment, you couldn’t ask much more from next week’s special summit – but just as important is what comes after, and in the years to come.
Read here.